Coming out of this week’s IMS meeting, Ray Henderson has a good post up describing the progress Blackboard was able to demonstrate toward support of the IMS Common Cartridge (CC) and Basic Learning Tool Interoperability (BLTI) standards. Sometimes it’s hard to tell from a distance how committed a company is to implementing a standard—particularly one […]
Academic Study of Blackboard vs. Sakai at UNC School of Medicine
Brian Moynihan has posted his Masters Thesis on University of North Carolina School of Medicine’s LMS evaluation, which eventually came down to a shootout between Blackboard and Unicon-supported Sakai. There’s a lot that’s of interest in this paper, particularly around the complexity of higher ed IT environments and the need for integration, but these two […]
Sakai, Small Schools, and Pedagogy
Update: Michael Korcuska has a blog post up about some small colleges that have been successful with Sakai. Sakai has a reputation for being technology-driven and focused on the needs of large research universities. There was some truth to both of those claims in the early years of the project. However, the recent election of […]
Non-functional
You may not have noticed, but e-Literate had a brief outage yesterday which was fixed for me by the good folks at my ISP, SiteGround. Meanwhile, e-Literate‘s operator (i.e., me) has been experiencing a longer outage due to a nasty bout of bronchitis. I am starting to feel slightly more human today and will begin […]
How to Understand and Follow the Sakai Foundation
My friend Patrick Masson has started an EDUCAUSE wiki page to develop a working definition of “openness”. I’m going to sidestep the hot debate around that topic and focus instead on the distinction he makes between openness and transparency, which he defines as “provid[ing] the stakeholder community access to–and perhaps even a platform to inform–the […]
A Brief Word about the Mellon Foundation and Sakai
Update: Sakai Executive Korcuska has a more detailed blog post about what the Mellon Foundation is actually doing and the impact (or lack thereof) on Sakai. There’s been a fair bit of hand wringing online about today’s piece in the Chronicle indicating that the Mellon Foundation will be “eliminating” it’s Research in Information Technology grant […]
End of an Era
Now that the Blackboard/D2L patent fight is over, I am taking down the edupatent feed harvester, which never worked particularly well anyway. Mostly what showed up in the feed were my own posts, which you can still access by going to the edupatents tag.